Our mobile/web team are always looking out for great user authentication services. A recent one we have been testing is Auth0.
This company has been going for a couple of years now and have built up a really great reputation is this field.
They offer an authentication service for both web and mobile apps with a range of pricing options, including a free version.
Basically what they do is to take the hassle out of adding secure authentication too any web or mobile app.
When you sign up you get access to a great dashboard where you can start configuring the authentication services you want to use, which includes a great number of third party services.
Connections
The first thing you setup are your connections.
These are the services that will be used to handle the authentication. They come in these four categories
Database
They provide a secure database to hold user name / password combinations.
You can either pre-populate the database with your users or have the user create an account via a registration process
Social
They have a vast number of connections to various social media services.
Allowing users to use accounts that already exist, for instance their FaceBook account to authenticate with. The list is endless but includes services such as Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Box, GitHub and LinkedIn etc. The list goes on as you can see.
Enterprise
There are a number of enterprise options including Active Directory , Google Apps and Office 365
Password Less
They also offer access to services that don’t use passwords including SMS, email and TouchID.
You can configure any combination of these to provide flexible options for your users
Adding Apps:
Next you need to register your app to the system. There are 5 categories of apps you can add:
- Native Mobile Apps
- Web Apps
- Single page app
- Hybrid Mobile app
- Backend or API
Under each category you get quite a choice.
For instance under native mobile apps we have:
Whats nice is that offer support for both Objective-c and Swift for iOS.
Once you have registered you app, you can specify which combination of authentication connections you wish to use.
After that you are good to go.
You download the appropriate SDK for the type of app you are building and within a few minutes you should have some great secure authentication working.
They even deliver a UI you can use within your app.
Other features
They offer a range of other features including:
• Multi-factor authentication
• The ability to add extensions to support authentication providers
• Custom Rules
• Great reporting tools.
So all in all this is a great service. If you are in the market for cloud based authentication I strongly suggest you check out www.auth0.com
Until the next time, Richard